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TeknoHog writes "Robotics researchers from the UK and Japan have linked up a slime mold to remotely control a six-legged robot. The mold, which is naturally light-sensitive, is able to hide the robot in dark corners, and the scientists expect to further this technology for use in smaller, autonomous units. There is also a preprint of the research paper available from the University of Southampton."

well, at least they don't have to drill into a mammal's brain to do this one. The molds are cool though; a neighbor once panicked when a bright orange one appeared on wood chip mulch in his garden, until I told him what it was. "It's harmless and it eats bacteria" seems to be one of the more reassuring things you can tell someone about a creeping slime.

Now you've got me wanting to create a "hunting slime molds by remote control" website. Like the big game ones that they've banned here and there already, but I suspect even PETA would find it hard to attack hunting a one-celled organism, even if a large and colourful one.

That's your problem. You only have one. My dad taught me (by example) that if you can't find a tool, it means you don't have enough instances of that tool and you need to buy another one. Once you have thirty or so hammers, you won't have any trouble finding one around the house within 5 minutes or so.

a photocapacitor or some other light sensitive electronics wouldn't suffice?

Simple:

"Robot controlled by light sensitive electronics seeks corner" gets a quick nod before someone realises eight year olds have been doing it with the basic Lego Mindstorms kit for years.

"Slime mold remotely controls six legged robot" gets the quirky and weird headlines. Quirky and weird headlines can be claimed as public interest. Public interest can be parlayed in to additional funding for your otherwise unfundable project.

So, whilst it's not really any more exciting, it does get the trivia audience - which gets the funding. Thus, for PhDs who can't get Google to hire them, it's essential to use a cockroach or slime mold or something similarly quirky to keep you in tweed jackets and leather elbow patches.

Think about it... a slime mold, while naturally light-avoidant, won't naturally know how to manipulate robotic appendages. Rather than sneering dismissively, you might realize this is a significant step forward to creating hardware and software that can directly interface with your nervous system. Such technology has many awesome as well as frightening implications.

That's bull. Suppose you give me a hand-drill to drill a hole, and then say "Look, we've got a biological interface for drilling, we don't need Black and Decker!"

They shone light on a slime mould, it moved, and they tracked the movement. This does *not* count as a biological interface. And as other posters have pointed out, robots that could do this have been around since the 80s. It's been a schoolkid-level project since at the latest 1990.

I think the point is actually that a single-celled organism can do this just as well, or probably better, than any complicated adaptive control system that we can come up with.

Our task is to learn from nature, and that is what is being done here. People might want this to be more exciting, but great research is basic. They took two systems that were well-studied and well-understood (light-sensitive robots and single-celled organisms), smooshed them together, and found out just how well (or not well) we understood them to begin with.

dude they used the mold as a light sensor. something that has been done in electronics for years using organics as sensors.

It may be somewhat innovative, but the robot is simply using the mold as a light sensor and nothing more. They have been doing this in lab's for decades being able to read a cell's response to stimullation.

Except it's not directly interfacing with the nervous system at all. The mold naturally moves through mechanical means. The movement (or attempted movement) of the mold is amplified by moving the robot legs. This isn't much different than steer-by-wire, or a mouse, or any other input device; just on a much smaller scale, and obviously in this case the user is (probably) not aware of his participation.

The slime mold is analog, not digital. It's arguably more suitable for interaction with the real world (analog world.) Also, you are likely to get interesting behavioral artefacts as a result of using biological components as a control mechanism (presumably, the robot will behave more like a biological organism.)

I got the impression that the slime mold was telling the legged robot not only which way to move but how to move its legs. i.e., if you give a slime mold legs it will figure out how to use them to do what slime molds like to do (hide in the dark).

Similar study last year. Experimental "brain" (25,000 living neurons, taken from a rat's brain and cultured inside a glass dish) interacts with an F-22 fighter jet flight simulator through a specially designed multi-electrode array and a desktop computer

The news is that people are able to now work with them. Light sensors based on silicon and other materials simple take advantage of the light sensitive properties of the material. Using a biological material is no different, other than the need to 'feed' the sensor. As this story and experiment play out, there is no ready made practical application waiting for its development. The real advance here is working with biological sensors. Such work will hopefully lead to sensors that are sensitive enough to detect humans in the wreckage of a bombed building, or cancers (as some dogs can with smell) or other such sensitivities that simply don't seem possible with non-organic materials. This probably isn't going to lead to a bio-brain for robotics, but will make them much more sensitive in the sensor domain. Imagine if a robot could see or smell the way that some insects do? This would lead to robots that are much more capable, and much more useful for all sorts of dangerous work. Imagine a robot that works in water that can find even the tiniest of leaks on an oil tanker? Perhaps a robot that can sniff out drugs in cargo planes etc. The reason for sensors that are orders of magnitude better than what is available today goes without saying, more or less. This type of work will help make it more achievable, hopefully.

Already, they are training bees (in minutes) to sense out things that takes months of training for dogs. This type of bio-sensor systems will hopefully make such work even easier to achieve. I can see that one day, a search and rescue helicopter can drop a truck load of independent water robots that seek out and locate humans in the middle of the ocean, saving lives by finding them faster than current methods, and bio-sensors may be the ticket to such advances.

Cockroaches are immune to the effects of radiation, unlike most microprocessors. Using a cockroach to control a robot means you can use much chunkier (physically), and therefore more radiation-resistant electronics because they don't have to do any 'thinking'.

Already, they are training bees (in minutes) to sense out things that takes months of training for dogs. This type of bio-sensor systems will hopefully make such work even easier to achieve. I can see that one day, a search and rescue helicopter can drop a truck load of independent water robots that seek out and locate humans in the middle of the ocean, saving lives by finding them faster than current methods, and bio-sensors may be the ticket to such advances.

Okay, with some sleep and coffee, the finer point goes sort of like this: This proof of concept work allows researchers the opportunity to work with the bio-matter (slime) in order to do more than simply observe the 'properties of the material' so that in the future, perhaps, they can grow sharks olfactory senses (like stem cell research) so that they can load the shark senses into a robot, allowing it to guide search and rescue robots to bleeding (or otherwise) humans that are in the ocean from a ship wrec

It's not proof of concept if they can't expose the biological sensors to real stimuli. Why not? I'm guessing that light gradients in the real world aren't sufficient to drive the slime strongly enough to react quickly enough to be interesting.You have a good case with olfactory receptors being better in bio form than silicon, but it is almost certainly true that photoresistors are more sensitive to light than the slime. So why bother with it? (hint, the answer is grant money)

Thats no way to talk about the geeky research assistant holding the joystick... tho this description could be apt, I'm sure it applies to a fair few here on slashdot including myself after a late coding session (slimey, moldy, and avoiding light)

...attempts to merge a gelatinous cube with a Honda Civic have been less than successful. Kobold scientists blame this frustrating failure on a lower fuel efficiency due to the inefficient wind flow design. "We'd like to take these experiments to the next level," the designers said, "but we just don't have the experience at this time."

The Liberal Party of Canada is seeking anyone or anything to be the new party Leader.Currently most human beings and other vertebrates have declined the oportunity.Perhaps dark seeking slime molds could fulfill this roll. Cephalopods could also apply.

A Dalek would work. I was moreso thinking Kang from the TMNT series(I think in the original comics the "kang" race were good guys). Ie that brain-shaped creature inside the big humanoid robot body to walk around in.

...have linked up a slime mold to remotely control a six-legged robot...Me, being in charge of personell, am generally viewed as slime, and I generally view my subjects as six-legged robots. So doing the math I fail to see this inovation as something more than curcumspect.

I am not impressed by this at all. If you read the article header, it makes it seem like the Green slime somehow controls the robot in a way that it knows it is moving the robot to a dark corner. Instead, all that has been done is to sense the natural movement of the slime away from light and carry those command over to a robot. This, for me, is no different than the way we make CG characters like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. This is no new technology, just a new subject with a nudge to force the slime

This kind of technology, using an animal to control a vehicle by converting the animal's responses into control inputs for the vehicle, goes back at least to WWII... you can see a picture of one of Skinner's pigeon-guided bombs here [arischindler.com] and here [si.edu], and more details here [elecdesign.com].

It was never deployed, but it worked more than half the time in test runs... how good are today's "precision" munitions?

This has awesome potential. The article mentions that the slime mold also has sensory organelles for detecting prey. Some other type of robotic sensor could be used to stimulate those organelles, and the slime's predatory activities could be fed back into some giant robotic claws or something.